As someone born in central Iowa and has spent his entire life cheering for Iowa State athletics - including attending dozens of basketball and football games - the sight of Anthony Robles fawning over Iowa Hawkeye wrestling within Unstoppable was enough to make me sick. Luckily, I was sitting in the back of the theater, so the other audience members didn’t notice the metaphorical birds I was flipping to the screen. It was also a Saturday in the fall, so I was naturally donning an Iowa State sweatshirt and quickly checked the football score before and after the screening. How many Olympic gold medals does Iowa have in wrestling? Six. How many does Iowa State have? Also six. Never mind that Iowa has 24 National Championships and Iowa State only has 8.

All kidding aside, the sarcastic look of disgust I had on my face was not caused by the film itself. It’s a standard sports drama pitched (or, in this case, pinned) down the middle, complete with enough compelling performances and authentic emotion that you can easily forgive the clichéd elements that I thought we would have moved past at this point in cinema history.

One of those groan-worthy moments comes right at the top when a pair of girls in the crowd make fun of Anthony’s missing leg (he was born without his right leg) and wonder if it was some sort of DEI decision for him to compete. I guess they were blind to the fact that they’re spectators for the NHSCA High School Nationals and that Anthony was coming into this event with a 96-0 record during his junior and senior years.

Anthony dominates the match, which he hopes will attract the scouts at Iowa. The Hawkeyes pass him by, leaving his collegiate options to a full ride at Drexel or a walk-on position at his local Arizona State. It’s an easy decision on paper, but not so much in reality when you factor in that Anthony’s mother (Jennifer Lopez) is stuck in an abusive relationship with the toxically masculine Rick (Bobby Cannavale) and has to raise four other younger children. Anthony can’t in good conscience move away to Philadelphia for four years, so he takes the challenge of earning his spot as a Sun Devil.

It’s extremely commendable to see Anthony’s determination to do the right thing, especially when a scan through his Wikipedia page proves that screenwriters Eric Champnella, Alex Harris, and John Hindman hardly embellished any of the facts. There have been obstacles placed before him since birth, many of which would be classified as insurmountable by most people. And yet he always perseveres, earning the respect of everyone around him. In times like these, a few extra degrees of warmth hit my heart.

Jharrel Jerome is exceptional as Anthony. An Academy Award nomination would be well-deserved to go along with his Emmy award for the 2020 miniseries When They See Us. The digital effects to erase his leg are near perfect, and so is his physical commitment to the performance. But it’s also the quieter moments that illustrate his status as one of our finest rising stars. His scenes with his high school (Michael Peña) and college (Don Cheadle) coaches show the burning pride he has for what he accomplishes daily.

Ben Affleck and Matt Damon serve as producers on this story through their production company Artists Equity. They made their debut under that banner with last year’s Air. The editor of that film, and several of Affleck’s directorial efforts, was William Goldenberg, who makes his debut in the director’s chair here.

The glass-half-full approach would be that his workmanlike production doesn’t overshadow the quality performances he gets out of his cast. The glass-half-empty version would say that it’s rather flat, leaving everyone else to pick up the slack. The editing around the wrestling sequences is predictably solid, yet they lack the get-up-off-your-seat verve that many other sports dramas have been able to deliver. In the end, it’s all still done well enough to honor someone who deserves their story to be told on this scale, just not well enough to be as memorable as it should be.